The Best of The Cybersecurity Pulse — 2025 Edition
The posts that hit the hardest and a look ahead
Welcome to The Cybersecurity Pulse (TCP)! I’m Darwin Salazar, Head of Growth at Monad and former detection engineer in big tech. Each week, I bring you the latest security innovation and industry news. Subscribe to receive weekly updates! 📧
Looking Back
2025 is in the books. Wanted to get this out while I still have a window. Happy New Year to everyone reading, wishing you all an amazing 2026!
Now, a look back at what we’ve built.TCP started as a side project in 2023. I was a detection engineer at Datadog, curious about the GTM side of security: startups, product, how companies win. No strategy. No calendar. Just vibing and writing about what I found interesting.
This year, we hit some pretty cool milestones, did a rebrand (we now have swag + stickers), some posts went viral and even ended up on Hacker News 🌶️.
The numbers:
20,000+ total audience across Substack (8K+) and LinkedIn (12K+)
250,000+ visits to TCP
770,000+ impressions on LinkedIn
220,000+ members reached on LinkedIn
100K+ chats with our GPT agent, The Cybersecurity Professor
Numbers are nice but they don’t often cover the full impact. I optimize more for bringing value to the practitioners, CISOs, and builders who read and rely on TCP.
What readers are saying:
“The Cybersecurity Pulse is must read material in my opinion and you are doing this community a great service with what you do here.” — Stephen Garcia, CISO
“Best read in the cybersecurity space. Said what I said. It’s like knowledge candy but good for you!” — George Vittori, CISOExecNet
“This newsletter is a MUST! Great work. I’ve been loving these.” — Ron Eddings, Founder of Hacker Valley Media
Appreciate everyone who’s been rocking with TCP!
Across my work at Monad and TCP, I easily published 70+ blog posts.
Here are the posts that resonated most in 2025.
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The Wiz GTM Series: How They Built a $32B Sales Machine
Sure Wiz is an anomaly in many ways, but going from 0 to $32B in ~5 years is nothing to scoff at and there’s a lot to learn from how they did it.
This two-part series breaks down how they went from zero to the largest cybersecurity acquisition in history.
Part one covers the sales motion, partner ecosystem, and pricing strategy.
Part two digs into the sales org itself: how they scaled from founder-led selling to a 100% channel-based engine, the comp structures, the hiring profile, and why their land-and-expand motion worked so well.
Required reading for anyone building or scaling a security GTM team. Far and away the most-read content of the year.
The Future of Data Security: From Cloud to AI
With the mass adoption of AI in the enterprise, data security is having a moment, and this piece explored why. I dug into all the new risks AI has introduced including shadow AI, MCP and the new blast radius it creates, and why identity-centric approaches are winning.
Varonis stood out to me here: their graph-based model that ties data, identity, and access together is the direction the market is heading. I think data and identity are in the top 3 biggest concerns for security teams in 2026.
Splunk .conf 2025 Recap
I was on the ground in Boston for Splunk’s big conference. This recap covers the AI announcements, the Cisco integration story, and what it all means for security teams still running Splunk as their SIEM.
While it may not always seem that Splunk is keeping up with the startups in the space, they’ve got a ton of features in private preview and will come out blasting in 2026. A key theme for them, however, continues to be how expensive their software is. Even they acknowledged it multiple times.
Practical takeaways for anyone navigating the evolving SecOps landscape.
5 Takeaways from Black Hat x DEF CON
My recap from Hacker Summer Camp after 100+ conversations with practitioners, leaders, and vendors.
The big themes: AI security is a mess (one attendee said MCP security “feels like 1998 again”), SIEM fatigue is real and nobody knows what the ideal SOC looks like anymore, and security teams are building their own tailored solutions with AI for niche use cases.
Also: most booth messaging is still terrible, and CISOs care more about what their peers think than what your website says.
CyberMarketingCon 2025 Recap: What Matters Most in Security Marketing Today
Lessons from the GTM teams behind Wiz, Upwind, Palo Alto Networks, Armis, and more.
I was on stage for the first time since 2022, presenting on technical writing as a lead gen tool (a blog post that turned into an $800K deal).
This recap covers what stuck with me most: AI-EO, signal-led GTM, why safe is invisible, and why the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.
Building Monad
Outside of TCP, I spend most of my time building Monad. As a former detection engineer and security consultant, I believe data availability and data quality are the foundation everything else in security sits on. In 2025, we put that thesis into action:
Launched the industry’s most comprehensive real-time enrichments ecosystem. Security teams finally get context at ingest, not after the fact.
Acquired Tarsal, expanding our pipeline capabilities and bringing elite engineering talent into the fold.
Won Wiz’s inaugural Partner Award, validating what our customers already knew: Monad is the connective tissue for modern security data.
On the business side... we’re cooking. More on that soon
2026 is going to be a big year. Data pipelines and data quality aren’t just “nice to have” anymore. They’re the unlock for everything SecOps teams are trying to do: AI-driven detection, cost optimization, faster response.
We’re positioned to own that layer. Stay tuned 😉
What’s Coming
January kicks off with two pieces I’ve been working on: one on how AI reshaped cybersecurity offense and defense in 2025, and another on why identity is fundamentally broken.
In any case, I appreciate everyone who’s been rocking with TCP.
Let’s have a year in 2026 👨🏽🚀
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Bye for now 👋🏽
That’s all for this week… ¡Nos vemos la próxima semana!
Disclaimer
The insights, opinions, and analyses shared in The Cybersecurity Pulse are my own and do not represent the views or positions of my employer or any affiliated organizations. This newsletter is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial, legal, security, or investment advice.